The present invention relates to a composition suitable for the preparation of insect diet formulations, containing proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, salts, and lambda carrageenan; the composition contains maltodextrin and no agar. In addition, the present invention relates to an insect diet formulation, containing the composition described herein and water (room temperature). Furthermore, the present invention relates to a method for rearing insects from eggs, involving providing the insect diet formulation described herein and culturing the insects with the insect diet formulation.
The present state of the art in producing solid artificial diets for insects and mites depends on the use of agar which must be mixed at high temperatures (90-95° C.). Agar has been extensively used in solid artificial diet formulations due to the lack of other alternatives. Although agar based diets are reliable, diet preparations using agar are complicated by the high temperature required to suspend it in water and to maintain its liquid state (55-60° C.) and to prevent solidification. Mixing critical nutrients (e.g., vitamins) into an agar based diet formulation requires very precise timing prior to the threshold of diet solidification in order to prevent the thermal breakdown of these critical nutrients. If this is not done correctly some nutrients may lose activity resulting in the compromised quality of the insects reared on these diets.
There thus remains a need in the art for an effective insect diet formulation that does not require high temperatures during the mixing process and for a method for culturing insects from the egg stage to adult. The present invention described below provides an insect diet formulation, completely devoid of agar, which enables rearing of many different species of insects which is different from prior art media which required the use of agar and high temperatures for mixing.